Peiratikos

Over in the comments thread of Jeff Chatlos’s post about why so many people don’t read comics, Jeff asks Rose:

Rose: I’m VERY interested to hear what got you interested in comics in your 20s, and what your perceptions are as a latecomer. I look forward to reading what you have to say, either here or at your blog.

I am not, in fact, Rose, but I also started reading comics when I was 20 years old (about two years ago), and I’ve had some thoughts lately about how this affects my perception of all things comics. Actually, it’s partly Rose’s fault I started. I think the first comic I read as an adult was Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again, specifically the Wonder Woman-Superman sex scene. Rose and a friend of ours showed this to me, I have no idea why. (That was also when I first learned that superhero comics aren’t just for kids anymore. I was barely aware Superman comics were being published, let alone ones in which he and Wonder Woman destroyed mountains wth their mighty orgasms.) The second comic I read was Transmetropolitan. I’m not sure why, but I think because it was just about the first comic I heard of that wasn’t a superhero comic and I was intrigued by the idea. At first I avoided superhero comics because I figured they were probably pretty dumb, but then Rose made me read Young Justice and next thing you know here I am with a copy of Crisis on Infinite Earths on my bookshelf.

Now, first of all, the fact that I began reading comics as an adult means I don’t have the baggage of exposure to Rob Liefeld at an impressionable age. I suspect a great deal of the “Superheroes are for kids, quit reading that crap!” criticism I see is driven by the deep-seated embarrassment of people who read X-Force when they were kids. On the other hand, it also means I never developed a childlike emotional attachment to any characters. This seems to be a fairly common criticism of adult ‘fanboys,’ that they’re emotionally stunted losers who continue to read superhero comics because they’re obsessed with Superman. In fact, I avoided superhero comics (motivated by exactly the sorts of stereotypes I mention now) until Rose showed me some good ones. At the same time, she gave me lots of non-superhero comics (e.g. Kabuki) and small-press and minicomics. So I started reading as an adult with fairly sophisticated critical faculties, I expected superhero comics to be bad by default, I had someone to expose me to a wide variety of comics and help me avoid the really bad stuff, I haven’t had a chance to get burnt out (which seems to happen rather frequently among longtime comics readers). I do think all this gives me an ‘advantage’ over people who’ve read comics since they were children, in that I just haven’t had the opportunities to build up bad baggage with superhero comics. Now, if I had read X-Force as an impressionable young lad, would I now scorn superhero comics as childish trash? I have no idea, obviously, but I do think my late arrival to comics played a large role in non-scorn of superhero comics.

Occasionally I take a look at the search engine keyphrases that bring people to Peiratikos and find some that I just have to share!

• you and i have unfinished business
• spreewald pickles
• neilalien nick cave
• freudian comics
• ethics for kids
• herodotus goes to hollywood
• righteous indignation in literature
• is the snake in the garden the link between man and animal
• marquis de sade blog
• fantasy art gorilla
• comics with metaphors in them
• a ballpoint banana batman
• what does the acronym marvel stand for?
• i hate work
• become a real life batman

It just goes on and on! I hope you all found what you were looking for, folks.

In my last Kill Bill post, I wrote “I much enjoy the collage aesthetic (I usually call it a remix or DJ aesthetic), but I prefer the playful expressiveness of, say, Moulin Rouge to the cynical play of Kill Bill.” Now, it’s possible I’m a little obsessed with Moulin Rouge, so I’d better say more about it!

Walter Benjamin, in 1935, wrote an essay called The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Here’s what he had to say:

The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object.

One might subsume the eliminated element in the term “aura” and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind.

And a bit later:

Works of art are received and valued on different planes. Two polar types stand out; with one, the accent is on the cult value; with the other, on the exhibition value of the work. Artistic production begins with ceremonial objects destined to serve in a cult. […] With the emancipation of the various art practices from ritual go increasing opportunities for the exhibition of their products. It is easier to exhibit a portrait bust that can be sent here and there than to exhibit the statue of a divinity that has its fixed place in the interior of a temple. The same holds for the painting as against the mosaic or fresco that preceded it. And even though the public presentability of a mass originally may have been just as great as that of a symphony, the latter originated at the moment when its public presentability promised to surpass that of the mass.

With the different methods of technical reproduction of a work of art, its fitness for exhibition increased to such an extent that the quantitative shift between its two poles turned into a qualitative transformation of its nature.

Benjamin’s idea is that a work of art loses its intangible “aura” of authority and authenticity when it becomes mechanically reproducible—the Mona Lisa becomes a little less special when you can get it on a refrigerator magnet and don’t have to go to the musée du Louvre to see it. The quality of a work of art, which used to be all about its special aura of artness, now becomes much more a matter of its exhibitionary and entertainment value.

This may lead to one a big question of (post)modern thought: nihilism or anti-nihilism? When fundamentally authoritative things lose their authority, does that mean there is no authority—or that everything has authority? Nothing is worth anything, or everything is worth something?

There’s another consquence: if art loses its authority, we no longer have to ‘respect’ it. The original isn’t what’s important, what’s important is the exhibition of a reproduction of the original which “meet[s] the beholder or listener in his own particular situation” and “reactivates the object reproduced.” Interpretation may supersede original meaning. Recontextualization may supersede original context. The text stops being a cathedral and becomes a playground. We get Troy and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (hilariously referred to as Wiliam Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet).

And there’s another thing to consider: information overload! Meme invasion! Thanks to the Internet and mass media, we have access to a ridiculous amount of information. What do we do with all of it? There’s no way we can process it all. Things are decontexualized. A lot of kids probably think “Revenge is a dish best served cold” really is an old Klingon proverb. What to do?

Remix aesthetic is a response to all this. Mash-ups. The Grey Album. Moulin Rouge. For artists like Luhrmann, everything is worth something, but not for whatever it’s ‘supposed’ to mean. Decontexualization and crises of meaning provide opportunities to play in the text, recontextualize, make new meaning.